Unclebaldrick
Well-Known Member
Mass media narrative managers have been throwing a fit ever since Senator Bernie Sanders criticized The Washington Post for providing unfair coverage of him at a New Hampshire town hall on Monday.
“Anybody here know how much Amazon paid in taxes last year?” Sanders asked the crowd.
“Nothing!” the crowd answered back.
“See, and I talk about that all of the time, and then I wonder why The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, doesn’t write particularly good articles about me. I don’t know why,” Sanders said.
The reaction has been swift and furious. Outlets ranging from NPR to CNN to Fox News have claimed that Sanders’ comments are “Trump-like” and “echoing Trump”. CNN’s segment on the story insinuated multiple times that there is no evidence for Sanders’ claims of biased coverage by WaPo.
“Sen. Sanders is a member of a large club of politicians — of every ideology — who complain about their coverage,” reads a statement by WaPo Executive Editor Marty Baron. “Contrary to the conspiracy theory the senator seems to favor, Jeff Bezos allows our newsroom to operate with full independence, as our reporters and editors can attest.”
All of these people are lying. During the hottest and most contentious point in the 2016 presidential primary, Fair.org documented the fact that The Washington Post published no fewer than sixteen smear pieces about Sanders in the span of sixteen hours. This sixteen-hour window included Sanders’ debate with Hillary Clinton in the tightly contested state Michigan, where Sanders went on to score a narrow but hugely significant upset victory. To say that WaPo has a history of bias against Sanders is not conspiratorial, Trumpian or lacking in evidence, it’s an intellectually honest acknowledgement of an undeniable and well-documented fact.
As of this writing I have not yet seen a single one of the outlets decrying Sanders’ comments about The Washington Post make any reference at all to those sixteen WaPo smear pieces in sixteen hours. This is journalistic malpractice, as is the suggestion that there is no evidence of bias in WaPo’s reporting about Sanders. While huffily protesting the insinuation that a plutocrat-owned media outlet might not give honest coverage to a politician campaigning on the taxation of plutocrats, these media industrial complex narrative managers are themselves churning out dishonest coverage. They’re doing the thing that they insist they don’t do.
Some have gone so far as to call Sanders’ self-evident and completely undeniable accusation of bias “dangerous”.
“This seems like a really dangerous line, continued accusations against the media with no basis in fact or evidence provided,” said CNN anchor Poppy Harlow after running a clip of Sanders’ campaign manager criticizing corporate influence in the media.
Of course, what is actually dangerous is placing blind faith in a mass media institution for no reason other than to prevent that institution’s representatives from getting outraged and indignant when you don’t.
There is no legitimate reason to give mass media institutions the benefit of the doubt in any area whatsoever; their outrage and indignation is based on nothing other than their own self-appointed position as arbiters of truth and reality. There is no law that says plutocratic media must be trusted by the public and praised by politicians, and if there were that law would belong in the toilet. Their whole entire argument, when you boil it right down, is that nobody should distrust the mass media because when they do it hurts the mass media’s feelings. This is not a valid argument to make.
This is especially true of The Washington Post, which is wholly owned by a CIA contractor and never discloses this conflict of interest when reporting on the US intelligence community as per standard journalistic protocol. This same CIA contractor, who is also the wealthiest plutocrat in the world, sits on a Pentagon advisory board and is according to some experts working to control the underlying infrastructure of the entire economy. To suggest that a newspaper that is owned by such a figure has in any way earned the benefit of the doubt is insane. The world’s most adept plutocrat did not invest in the purchase of The Washington Post because he expected newspapers to make a profitable resurgence. That did not happen.
All plutocrats, once their wealth control grows to a certain size, begin buying up narrative control to ensure the perpetuation of the status quo they’ve built their fortune upon. They all have public relations firms, many of them fund influential think tanks, many use corporate lobbying and advertising incentives, some buy up media shares, and some buy up entire media outlets. Bezos did the latter.
No branch of the US government could get away with holding the stated position that they are entitled to the trust of the public and that any distrust is dangerous and unfounded. The entire system of checks and balances built into the US governmental system are there solely out of a distrust of unchecked power. Unchecked power of course exists in America, but no branch of its government could ever get away with openly claiming that the total trust of the public is their property that they own. Yet this is exactly what the talking heads of the plutocratic media do whenever any public figure on the left or the right has the temerity to claim that they are untrustworthy. They demand more trust than the government despite their inseparable entanglements with the same plutocratic class that is deeply entangled with that same government.
“Anybody here know how much Amazon paid in taxes last year?” Sanders asked the crowd.
“Nothing!” the crowd answered back.
“See, and I talk about that all of the time, and then I wonder why The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, doesn’t write particularly good articles about me. I don’t know why,” Sanders said.
The reaction has been swift and furious. Outlets ranging from NPR to CNN to Fox News have claimed that Sanders’ comments are “Trump-like” and “echoing Trump”. CNN’s segment on the story insinuated multiple times that there is no evidence for Sanders’ claims of biased coverage by WaPo.
“Sen. Sanders is a member of a large club of politicians — of every ideology — who complain about their coverage,” reads a statement by WaPo Executive Editor Marty Baron. “Contrary to the conspiracy theory the senator seems to favor, Jeff Bezos allows our newsroom to operate with full independence, as our reporters and editors can attest.”
All of these people are lying. During the hottest and most contentious point in the 2016 presidential primary, Fair.org documented the fact that The Washington Post published no fewer than sixteen smear pieces about Sanders in the span of sixteen hours. This sixteen-hour window included Sanders’ debate with Hillary Clinton in the tightly contested state Michigan, where Sanders went on to score a narrow but hugely significant upset victory. To say that WaPo has a history of bias against Sanders is not conspiratorial, Trumpian or lacking in evidence, it’s an intellectually honest acknowledgement of an undeniable and well-documented fact.
As of this writing I have not yet seen a single one of the outlets decrying Sanders’ comments about The Washington Post make any reference at all to those sixteen WaPo smear pieces in sixteen hours. This is journalistic malpractice, as is the suggestion that there is no evidence of bias in WaPo’s reporting about Sanders. While huffily protesting the insinuation that a plutocrat-owned media outlet might not give honest coverage to a politician campaigning on the taxation of plutocrats, these media industrial complex narrative managers are themselves churning out dishonest coverage. They’re doing the thing that they insist they don’t do.
Some have gone so far as to call Sanders’ self-evident and completely undeniable accusation of bias “dangerous”.
“This seems like a really dangerous line, continued accusations against the media with no basis in fact or evidence provided,” said CNN anchor Poppy Harlow after running a clip of Sanders’ campaign manager criticizing corporate influence in the media.
Of course, what is actually dangerous is placing blind faith in a mass media institution for no reason other than to prevent that institution’s representatives from getting outraged and indignant when you don’t.
There is no legitimate reason to give mass media institutions the benefit of the doubt in any area whatsoever; their outrage and indignation is based on nothing other than their own self-appointed position as arbiters of truth and reality. There is no law that says plutocratic media must be trusted by the public and praised by politicians, and if there were that law would belong in the toilet. Their whole entire argument, when you boil it right down, is that nobody should distrust the mass media because when they do it hurts the mass media’s feelings. This is not a valid argument to make.
This is especially true of The Washington Post, which is wholly owned by a CIA contractor and never discloses this conflict of interest when reporting on the US intelligence community as per standard journalistic protocol. This same CIA contractor, who is also the wealthiest plutocrat in the world, sits on a Pentagon advisory board and is according to some experts working to control the underlying infrastructure of the entire economy. To suggest that a newspaper that is owned by such a figure has in any way earned the benefit of the doubt is insane. The world’s most adept plutocrat did not invest in the purchase of The Washington Post because he expected newspapers to make a profitable resurgence. That did not happen.
All plutocrats, once their wealth control grows to a certain size, begin buying up narrative control to ensure the perpetuation of the status quo they’ve built their fortune upon. They all have public relations firms, many of them fund influential think tanks, many use corporate lobbying and advertising incentives, some buy up media shares, and some buy up entire media outlets. Bezos did the latter.
No branch of the US government could get away with holding the stated position that they are entitled to the trust of the public and that any distrust is dangerous and unfounded. The entire system of checks and balances built into the US governmental system are there solely out of a distrust of unchecked power. Unchecked power of course exists in America, but no branch of its government could ever get away with openly claiming that the total trust of the public is their property that they own. Yet this is exactly what the talking heads of the plutocratic media do whenever any public figure on the left or the right has the temerity to claim that they are untrustworthy. They demand more trust than the government despite their inseparable entanglements with the same plutocratic class that is deeply entangled with that same government.
